Avatar

Great day. Let's start off with that. Today was a great day because I got to spend an entire day with some of my close friends that I rarely get to hang out with. Since we never really have time to hang out outside of school collectively, a group of friends and I decided to just clear an entire day and just have fun, and you know what, it worked. In the end it worked out to be a great day of ice skating (or ice shuffling in my case), lunch, dessert and then seeing Avatar.

At 11:30 we all met up at Reston town Center which is a large outdoor restaurant/semi high end shopping complex to go ice skating at the outdoor ice pavilion before it got too crowded. In total about 8 of us made it (out of 11 originally) and we set off to go rent some skates. To my dismay, they only had hockey skates for my shoe size which annoyed me since I can't skate with hockey skates at all because they have no spikes along the front of each skate, also combined with the fact that the skates were rather dull and slightly misaligned they made skating that much more difficult. When I got on the ice, I had a fun time trying to figure out how to move forward without falling flat onto my face but eventually ended up just shuffling along and eventually shakily gliding, luckily I wasn't the only one who had trouble, one of my other friends had trouble too. We ended up making chains of people as "insurance" which helped sorta and we got a few laughs when some of us "fell" but got saved mid-fall via the chain. To make things even better, there were some pretty cute guys there, and maybe I was hallucinating but there was only guy that I encountered a few times too many for it be be just coincidence if you get what I'm saying. By 1PM we left to go get lunch at Big Bowl which is a sorta Pan-Asian restaurant who had some pretty awesome chicken Pad Thai. We also exchanged secret santa gifts, my santa got me a pretty cool therapeutic cookbook which features recipes which feature heavily on supposedly curative herbs and the background histories on each which is perfect for the history-cooking nerd I am. Afterwards we still had about 45 minutes to kill so we decided to go to Cosi and order smores for all of us. So the way it works at Cosi is that they bring you a giant platter with a small gel-fueled burner in the middle surrounded by graham cracker, hersheys bars and giant marshmallows and skewers. Essentially uou roast your marshmallows yourself and build your smores on your own (pretty awesome). I ordered some hot chocolate to go along with that which was deliciously rich and choclolately. We left around 3:40 to go to the theater.

So, how good was Avatar, James Cameron's $237M sci-fi CG-breakthrough super film? Well, initially I was kinda suspicious as to how good it was actually going to be. Usually there is so much hype surrounding the film that it ends up being a disappointment when you actually see it and I was worried this is how it would turn out. Well, I am happy to report it wasn't in fact, it was very good, superb in fact in terms of visual amazingness. (Spoiler Alert!) Taking place in 2154 on a Earth-like planet (actually moon) where humans are trying to mine a mineral which supposedly would solve Earth's energy woes, it follows the tried and true story of human falls in love with alien being (aka forbidden love, cliché #1) and then helps save a "savage" race and planet from human capitalistic greed and destruction. Isn't this a not so subtle hint to the native american relocation/plight during westward expansion? Cameron did an amazing job with the setting of the movie, it was absolutely stunning and scarily realistic, I can only imagine how amazing it would have looked if we saw it in 3-D. The creatures and inhabitants of the planet were beautiful in an alien-way and the landscape was so realistic that I would have been fooled if it weren't for the floating mountains which reminded me of the islands of Halong Bay in Vietnam. The plot itself wasn't the best in the world, too many clichés in my opinion (I'll list later) but the visuals more than made up for it. The final battle scene was especially stunning. If you haven't seen the movie yet, i really suggest you do, in 3-D preferable, I can only imagine how good that would be for this movie.

Avatar is debatably one of the best movies of the year but there were a few too many clichés -

1. Human protagonist encounters a native for the first time, and it happens to be the chiefs daughter
2. Human outsider ends up as "the chosen one"
3. Human protagonist gets drawn into native cause, becomes leader of the natives in quest for liberation and/or to drive out invaders
4. Humans are destructive, greedy and view all alien civilizations as "savages"
5. The tribal chief dies
6. Nature holds the answer/cure to EVERYTHING
7. Main antagonist has some battle scar, usually cuts across the face as is here
8. Human protagonist loses trust of natives, but later regains it in some extreme fashion (such as magically wrangling a mystic bird like creature only 5 people in recorded native history have done)

Granted these might not all be clichés and just recurring themes in movies but there were some of these and some plot holes that didn't really detract from the movie.

Before I go I would like to respond to Ethan's comment on my last post where he noted that I haven't been getting many comments on my posts. The whole purpose of me starting this blog was to serve as a way for me to share my thoughts, feelings, daily events and opinions - sort of an online journal. Whether people read or comment on my blog is not something I am terribly concerned about or anything I'm going to lose sleep over. Since the beginning I never had any expectation for my blog to be a hub of attention and commenting so whether people choose to comment or not is totally up to them and not something I concern myself with. Not to say I don't enjoy reading comments; I love them to be perfectly honest, it shows people are actually reading about what I've been recently thinking about, but that's not the focus of my blog. I admit I have neglected my blog as of late; my posts have been fewer and farther between and admittedly less interesting, especially with school and crew eating up all my time, but the purpose of my blog remains - it's a release for me. This blog somewhere I can share my thoughts anonymously and whether people read or choose to comment or not does not detract from this.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! Have a Merry Christmas everyone.
(And yes, Merry CHRISTMAS, to hell with political correctness.)

All the best,

JP